Starlink internet is not meant to replace hard line internet. There is no getting around the physics of cable being so much cheaper/easier. Even terrestrial cell towers are more efficient and cheaper than satellites.
This is 100% meant to supplement existing infrastructure not to replace it. You will almost always get cheaper and faster internet (for both you and the company providing internet) over a cable to your house. If you can't get that, then maybe a cell tower is better, if that doesn't work, then a land based beaming internet may be better, after that I'd look to space based internet.
It can probably supplant land based beaming internet, but I don't see this replacing ISPs/4g/5g anytime soon.
The target audience for much of this infrastructure is the places you can't put a cell tower, but want to get signal. Ocean based travel being a big one.
EDIT: I will contend. 5g could beat out ISPs at cost (which I thought I'd made more clear above). It's about the cost of infrastructure given the population density. I don't have as much knowledge in that area as I do satellite costs. But satellites won't beat out 5G at cost, not even with the reduced cost to space that SpaceX provides. It could with another couple orders of magnitude cost reduction in space. But there's a reason SpaceX is targeting only 5 million Americans and not 300 million.
This is 1000% my point. There is now a baseline amount of signal per KM. That signal is now the same everywhere. It will be (about) the same speed everywhere.
This is really great for more rural areas and over the ocean.
That's not how it works. There are intentionally launching satellites at different inclinations so that they can cover more densely populated areas with more bandwidth. The speed and capacity is absolutely not uniform over the entire globe.
We already had a baseline amount from geosynchronous and Iridium. This is increasing bandwidth and reducing latency, but is not establishing the first baseline.
Gah - I got so caught up in this thread. Finally something I know a fair bit about.
Yes, there is a baseline. But that's like saying dail-up is a baseline. Everyone might have it but it doesn't give people access to the modern web.
Geo, can be great in some services but it's again not a blanket. They have broad beams but they're moving to spot beams instead and those beams don't move.
This constellation is really going to be the same bandwidth capacity across the globe within a given altitude band. Which is awesome.
A lot of what you're saying isn't actually true here.
Light moves significantly (47%) slower through optical fiber than through space. This drastically reduces the latency of long distance connections. We're talking NY round trip to Japan in the same time it takes NY roundtrip to the UK now.
The cost of backhaul and ongoing maintenance of cables is a lot more than SpaceX launching their own satellites by an entire order of magnitude.
>A lot of what you're saying isn't actually true here.
You're talking latency not bandwidth. There is only so much spectrum to go around.
My understanding is that there is only a certain amount of bandwidth to go around and there are diminishing returns on adding people beyond a set capacity. I am not arguing that fiber is faster, I'm arguing that fiber has is cheaper at the bandwidth/cost in more dense areas. I don't believe we will see satellite based communication in cities (at a large % of population) for a long time.
Now I'm willing to believe someone who's worked closer to this than I have and to learn, but I've done enough in the satellite industry to not take what you're saying without seeing more evidence.
I worked for an ILEC providing cable/dsl/fiber service and just the rough napkin math around SpaceX's launch costs makes it look significantly cheaper.
Besides the whole digging and laying cable costs, last mile work is expensive. You have to employ huge crews. Construction crews constantly dig up & cut your infrastructure "by accident" and the cost of recovering the fines from them is as much as the fines pay out. Having to send an emergency crew of three guys out for 18 hours of work to re-splice a 72-ct fiber every other weekend adds up. That doesn't happen in space.
The SpaceX approach also completely bypasses a ton of the nonsense local bureaucracy, stonewalling by existing ISPs, etc that a company would have to deal with to put in cables, towers, etc in the first place, saving both time and money.
Yup. This is actually one of the more important factors for consumers that is underestimated.
I've been pegged at 1000% excitement since I first found out about this project a year ago. This is the best thing to happen to this service industry since probably ISDN.
This is not a good thing. Eventually countries will heavily regulate satellites and then SpaceX will be the monopoly that keeps small players out. Instead of postponing the problem of getting rid of an evil monopoly, citizens should realize that last mile internet delivery is practically identical to water, sewage and power systems that can be owned by the city and leased out to providers.
FWIW, last mile costs only matter if your last mile isn't wireless, more or less. Terrestrial internet doesn't imply wire/fiber to the premises, does it?
The costs of installing and maintaining infrastructure scale down to nothing with population density. Also you can upgrade a switch but not if it's on a satellite. I am very convinced that the two approaches will complement each other in the foreseeable future.
SpaceX isn't doing the install work work on these Starlink kits. They just sell you some hardware.
If you're a terrestrial-based internet provider, you need a fleet of installers and they also have to do constant maintenance work. They have salaries and they make (lots of) overtime pay. At a lot of the smaller companies (like the one I worked at) they have pensions. We had a lot of guys who started with the company out of high school, retired at 20 years, came back as contractors for a year and then did another 20 years and got a second pension from the same company...
And a couple of those guys are still contracting after their two pensions.
SpaceX can't scale regionally, they have to scale globally. The nature of their satellites is that if they want to accommodate 2x as many users in a city they have to double their capacity.
The push I'm discussing is the cost to get a baseline internet out there for 10k people per 100 miles.
I'm assuming the cost per last mile is higher in rural areas than in urban areas. If that's true right now the majority of our population is in cities so SpaceX will have trouble reaching them.
That's the core of my point. For Starlink to hit everyone in a city they'd have a huge amount of wasted capacity in rural areas.
Satellites also degrade naturally over time. They have a set lifetime and don't all last that long. Cables under the ground tend to last longer even if they require spot fixes. I'm assuming that bandwidth wise, the cables are more efficient at least until getting manufactured equipment to space becomes even more cheaper.
Yeah but we're talking about a company that has in their near-term plans the capability to _launch 4 rockets per day_.
They're completely capable of adding capacity like that and having a high satellite count.
I'm not saying that it doesn't have a cost, but they have no middleman. They don't need to buy space on somebody else's rocket. They also don't have to pay any ongoing maintenance cost beyond equipment replacement and it's much cheaper than doing it on land. I know that you have satellite experience but their launch costs are a fraction of what other companies have done till now.
I worked for a suburban, regional ILEC and our operating costs were around 100 million a year to cover like two counties of maybe 100k customers and the local businesses.
...
I actually do agree with you about costs delivering in dense markets as providing locally has certain "economy of scale" benefits. It's also not going to compete on the "Gigabit in every home" front, because I do agree that the bandwidth is more limited. Operating a local provider in general though is extremely expensive and doesn't really provide any additional benefit to the provider. SpaceX themselves have uses for this network. I also hope that I'm right here :)
The bandwidth here is 100K per state not 2 counties. That's my issue with your calculations, we're probably somewhere in the middle. They might stop servicing people outside of town. I'd probably use the metric, if you're on septic you're probably better served by SpaceX than Comcast. If you're on sewer then Comcast will probably be better (no not always, I'm no sith).
We'll have to agree to disagree. Honestly, I hope you're correct and I'm wrong. I think ground based infrastructure is still going to be much cheaper at medium to high population densities. You don't agree with me, but I learned a lot in this back and forth. Thanks.
Their target launch cadence has been missed by quite a bit for many years. At this point they are only launching their own satellites at a cost to them, and not launching very many paying customer payloads at all.
This is absolutely not true. They are still selling you a dish in a terminal that most of the population could not install themselves on their house. The majority of the installs will be professionaly done.
This thread isn't about what other satellite providers do. It's about the Cable/Fiber/DSL providers. And even when those companies use contractors to do the work (like Spectrum, Comcast, etc), they're still the ones paying those contractors.
Please reread this thread. This is the comment I was replying to:
> SpaceX isn't doing the install work work on these Starlink kits. They just sell you some hardware.
If you're a terrestrial-based internet provider, you need a fleet of installers and they also have to do constant maintenance work
This is not true. SpaceX is absolutely going to be doing most of the installs through independent contractors. The original post implied they just ship you the antenna and the end user can set it up, which is wrong.
Absolutely not correct. Read the terms from what they sent everyone in the beta program:
"You are responsible for installing the Starlink Kit. Do not allow third parties, or those not associated with SpaceX, to access or install the Starlink Kit unless you obtain approval from SpaceX," Starlink says.
"Do not install the Starlink Kit at your home if you do not have the authority to do so. It is your responsibility to ensure compliance with all applicable zoning, ordinances, covenants, conditions, restrictions, lease obligations and landlord/owner approvals related to the installation location."
SpaceX is not doing any of these installs themselves or through contractors. They've been very up front about this and how it's not just going to be for the beta program.
Keep up the FUD though.
It's a phased array antenna -- it's really simple to install. People are already doing this themselves on top of RVs and work trucks. It has motors that are self-adjusting. Their instructions are "1) plug in socket, 2) point at sky."
Wrong. A beta program where they don't want things leaked is very different from the real system. They self-selected a group of people capable of doing this. Do you really think that millions of real customers are capable installing on their own? More importantly, doing this without an issue later that requires calling customer service. It doesn't matter if it's a phased array. It MUST be installed securely in a location where there would be no blocking. This requires a professional. Trust me, I'm very familiar with this industry, and Elon can't work magic. You are taking your own understanding of how the general population is and assuming they're all reddit/HN readers.
Please show me where they've been up front that after the beta it will continue to do this. Also remember that almost everything Elon has said about starlink has turned out to not be accurate or delayed.
The current generation of Starlink doesn't actually have any optical inter-satellite links which would forward your packets from satellite to satellite around the world.
Your packets will go up to the satellite, immediately down again to the next ground station and from there to the destination through the normal fiber backbone.
SpaceX has to pay the same fiber cost in terms of latency as everyone else. They do not have gateways near every PoP, and will need to backhaul a nontrivial distance to add latency.
The constant c is the speed of light in a vacuum. Different mediums have different speeds of light within them; in fact, it's actually possible for light to not be the fastest thing in a given medium (for more precise definitions of all those words): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation
Altought the answers so far posted are not exactly incorrect, it is also important to note that the geometry (that is, a cylinder for optical fibers) of the waveguide used influences the group velocity of the propagating electromagnetic field.
This will always end up being slower than a plane wave in the same material, usually only somewhere between 10%-90% (and this also depends on the wavelength) of the free-space group velocity.
> "You will almost always get cheaper and faster internet (for both you and the company providing internet) over a cable to your house."
Not true for me, and I live 10 minutes walk from the financial centre of a major world city. Because there's no fibre installed to my building, unlimited ~300 Mbps 5G wireless internet is both cheaper and faster than any available fixed alternative. Even if fibre was available, the 5G would probably still be cheaper!
>If you can't get that, then maybe a cell tower is better, if that doesn't work, then a land based beaming internet may be better, after that I'd look to space based internet.
It is cheaper for a company, to run fiber to your house than to build a cell tower that handles ALL the people within that region given a certain density of houses.
It doesn't mean it's cheaper for your building to do it.
In the context of space vs ground infrastructure. Ground (including cell tower) is much cheaper. And they'll add 5G to the financial centers of the world before they add it to Wyoming.
The reason companies don't "advertise" hostpots as an alternative to fiber/cable is bandwidth. It works great if you read HN, but if everyone did it, they'd start running more fiber, or cost of cell data would go way up.
Sorry, My experience is mostly US based. I looked into this heavily in my area 2+ years ago.
T-Mobile, AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon say their hotspots are not meant for this in my region. At least that was 2 years ago in Sub-urban Seattle and 3 years ago D.C.
In fact, I'm pretty sure there's fibre running down the road directly outside the front door of our building. Probably multiple different providers! There's conduits under the footpath and I've seen them threading reels of cable down there late at night.
That said, I'm very happy with 5G. There are some key advantages over fibre:
- Cheap. I pay £30/month with no fixed contract terms. Any fibre around that price is slower and comes with a 12 or 24 month minimum contract.
- Very high reliability. If a cell tower goes down, it will simply switch to another one. At my last flat, the cable internet would seem to go down for 15 or 30 or 60 minutes pretty regularly, perhaps every 1-2 months. And that's just the times I was home and noticed!
- Portability. Wouldn't be much use in a large household, but for personal use it's great that I can just pick up my battery-powered router and take it with me for fast WiFi anywhere. Including roaming around Europe (5G roaming in selected countries!)
I'm just not convinced the "physics of trenching and stringing cables from poles" (whatever we're taking this to mean) is cheaper and easier than wireless points popped up, either terrestrially or in space.
Let me be super clear about what I meant in my first comment.
Satellites are VERY susceptible to overcrowding, this is what I mean by physics. Co-Channel interference and Adjacent Satellite Inteference play a big role. The more signal you use the more of a problem it becomes.
Think about it like this. Your car radio, has how many available stations? Have you ever gotten multiple signals at the same time? This is all a really big problem for space based communication you just can't solve with more signal.
Don't get me wrong we can do a lot with our spectrum, but there is a limited amount and if we both want to communicate with a satellite and we live 100 feet apart, our signals will interfere much more than if we live 1000 feet apart.
I'm not saying stringing cables is cheaper, I'm saying laying fiber from hub to hub and then connecting to those hubs is cheaper if you're within 50 mile radius. Maybe cellular is cheaper, maybe a wire to your house is cheaper. It depends on how many people you have close to you.
All this beaming technology is available on earth (4g/5g) but we don't use it for our home internet... Why is that? Cost of bandwith per person to infrastructure.
If you're in Silicon Valley then you probably get GREAT cell service, why not use a hotspot as your internet. That signal to your phone is orders of magnitude cheaper than space based signal.
No, you don't have the same problems as everywhere else. You said it took 10 years to get fiber, there are rural places where that's not an option.
There are places where there is no sewer and houses must have septic.
There are places where there is no water and houses must have wells / rain capture.
Those are the target audience for this technology. Not people who are waiting to go from 60 -> 100 -> 1000 Mbps. This won't compete there, not based on the specs of these satellites and their 10 year plan.
I was specifically addressing your claim that one could just use an LTE hotspot. I'm aware that there are rural communities that have worse infrastructure than the bay area.
You have better access to hotspot data than someone who is further from the nearest cell tower. I'm using a more physical infrastructure discussion to draw an analogy to what you might experience. It might make sense for someone in a city to build a well or water capture system, but in general it's not the same calculation as in more rural areas, where 1 mile of cable may reach 0.5 people vs 20.
What you have could easily be too many people per cell tower in your area, which would be the exact same problem that these satellites will encounter. The physics of adding a cell tower is much cheaper than adding more satellites.
I'M the one who said it took 10 years to get fiber. I'm not convinced wired infrastructure is cheaper/easier to deploy, when it means digging up millions (billions?) of miles of trenches across the country.
Nobody claimed "having fiber in silicon valley today" is not better than "having crap internet in rural america"
I have good LTE at my house. That doesn't mean I can get terabytes/month of transfer for a reasonable cost.
And by the way, my ENTIRE POINT was that "the physics of wires" is NOT "cheaper and easier".
Reply to my parent if you're looking for an argument as to why wired is better than wireless.
The problem is that the target audience you refer to doesn't have the amount of money it takes to sustain a system like this. Otherwise any of the existing satellite providers could continue to launch more and more satellites and serve very expensive internet to them. Starlink will be just as much, or more expensive.
I expect for them to make money it's going to need to cost $150 starting for the low end. Although, if they get government RDOF money, all bets are off since they're burning through government money.
Poor quality of internet on planes is usually due to too many people on the plane trying to do high-bandwidth things at the same time when the connection was never designed for that level of saturation. Domestic flights usually connect to ground-based stations to provide in-flight wi-fi, which probably have similar throughput capabilities to Starlink, so I don't think this would help much. International flights use satellite connections, though, and this would definitely help there.
I'm still a bit puzzled why ground based stations didn't catch on. Seems it should be much simpler - there's tons of towers already, flights paths are predictable and much lesser distance between plane and sat.
That said my experience with internet was very positive - anywhere from free 4K streaming to $20 per 17hr flight enough to do remote SaaS development. I guess US airlines keeps American tradition of depriving people of good internet.
One of the big excuses for the telecom/ISP monopolies in Canada is that they help serve rural areas (same deal with Canada Post).
I'm curious to see if this ends up having any effect on the current system.
Technically you could just directly subsidize access to the rural areas, for those who can't afford the much cheaper new satellite systems themselves, instead of giving these anti-consumer monsters free reign on the whole country in exchange for managing expensive infrastructure just to serve a small percentage of the population.
A cell tower today is basically a selective directional broadcast of ~2.5GHz backed by a microwave backhaul, conforming to local topography and about ~3 miles away.
An internet satellite is a phased array broadcast of ~20Ghz with a microwave backhaul without regard for local topography and about ~600 miles away.
... I am not sure there is obviously a better choice here, if the launch costs no longer dominate.
You can multiplex wavelengths for wireless just like cable right? Granted you'd need to buy the licenses for those frequencies, which should be fairly cheap in rural areas.
I don't think Elon would approve this project if cable is always cheaper and easier.
Why not? He doesn't have to reach everyone, just some portion of the population that's profitable.
My argument should have been this is only (imo) going to get at most 10% of the worlds population.
That's based on the signal interference in space. Scale gets costly.
EDIT: Then I'm done replying for real. This thread has been fun but I need to stop myself at some point. Thanks for replying.
physics => Co-channel and adjacent satellite interference to be specific, the closer you put your satellites the more signal they have to handle. These things are built to scale for the worlds population and you can't just add more satellites without scaling the whole constellation. If it was built to scale for NY city then they'd need to support that population density on every single satellite. But if they build it for Wyoming and steal those customers then they need to only scale for that and allow ISPs to keep NY city residents.
While it's cheaper for cable companies to lay wire close to hubs, it's cheaper for satellites to hit people the more spread out they are. So the physics of this constellation are such that it's cheaper for them to give more rural people a baseline of internet rather than upsetting ISPs. I think that's wishful thinking by many people who hate ISPs.
I'm not saying it's cheaper for cables to hit everyone everywhere in the world, or this system wouldn't exist. As I said earlier, it's meant to supplement a weakness in our current infrastructure by blanketing the world with cheap internet that works at lower population densities.
I used this metric in another thread, but if you're on Septic Starlink is probably for you. If you're on sewer then you're already surrounded by a density of infrastructure that probably makes ground based communication cheaper. No I'm not going to bet that someone on HN doesn't have a counter example for me, but overall I think this would probably make sense.
Fiber optic cables have a much much higher usable bandwidth than the wireless spectrum. The useful radio spectrum for Starlink is somewhere between 10 and 20 GHz. Fiber optic cables have more than 4THz of usable spectrum.
And it's no affected by things like fog, rain, strong wind (at least if you don't cheap out and stick it on poles), etc.
The problem is you're basing your argument solely on the physical act of running cable/wires everywhere. When you look at the cost of just hiring a crew to dig the ground or string wire on a pole you are correct. It's significantly cheaper and more reliable.
However, add in the human factor, government. The mess of rules, regulations, and right-of-way make it considerably more expensive to run wires everywhere.
I worked at a GEO company. They have a HUGE department just to work with governments to buy or keep their spectrum. The rules and regulations for spectrum are insane, and not just build this cable here in my county/state/country, but now this beam goes across borders what do I do? Oh wait, this region is contested by China/India we have to sell differently to each government.
Cost of labor => It's a calculation of how many people can be served per 1 mile (any unit) of cable. If that number is 20, cable wins. If it's 5, hotspot may win (which also uses cable FWIW). If it's 0.5 then these new satellites win. 5G may try to take more market from ISPs but they know they'll have to innovate to keep customers. I can 100% see cell towers being cheaper than cable, but not in every situation.
It's about supplementing not replacing infrastructure.
The cost of hiring a crew to dig up the ground runs to hundreds of dollars per foot. At $1MM for a satellite that can serve thousands of people is a lot cheaper.
If they all lived in the same location. If the cost is hundreds per square foot and each customer is 1000ft away from each other than thecosts become hundreds of thousands per address.
Line of sight or cell tower might work but when it doesn't a satellite will.
There is a set capacity for these satellites, they can accomodate X number of users per satellite which would be a region (I'm making an educated guess) about the size of New Jersey. I think the size is larger than that which means fewer users but I'm trying to ballpark during my lunch break.
So if they expect to have 10,000 users (again ballpark) in New Jersey, but they instead get 40,000 they'll increase their costs. If they get 1000 users in say Wyoming, then maybe the costs in Wyoming will be lower.
The issue is they have a world wide capacity of 10,000 users at 11 MBs over the size of New Jersey. Again, I haven't run these numbers but these are the kinds of calculations GEO sats make to set prices for say, airplanes traveling from US -> Europe. The difference is that GEO targets specific areas more rather than blanketing the entire earth due to them being stationary.
The benefit of Starlink is that it'll have approximately equal signal all over the earth. So if you're in a city it can cover the same number of people per mile as it can in the middle of the ocean.
I believe the satellites are moving, so there's no "Wyoming satellite customers" in the same way as existing satellite internet. The Wyoming customers will be sharing satellites with several other places as they move in and out of their regions
The constellation is moving but they are moving in a formation. Meaning you have a rotation of 2-4 satellites above your head at any give time. Each satellite can service a radius the size of Wyoming.
So you have a limit on the number of satellites and the number of customers per satellite.
The article says 5 million in the USA. That makes sense given what I'm thinking. That's about 100,000 per state, but it's not going to work like that. It's a good ballpark for the service they'll provide.
My main point, is if it's 100K per (1/50th the US) there will be less bandwidth in cities than in rural regions.
This is a HUGE boon to rural areas and will be amazing.
This will probably not affect you if you are urban or even suburban.
Their current plans talk about a constellation of 40,000 says.
While there is limit to number of connections per sat that applies to any routing equipment really, there is not much limit to how many sats can be there .
Sure spectrum is limited today ,however if 5million people use it already, other spectrum could be freed up for this purpose , if there is demand .
The constellation today is not ready for high density usage , it is not that it will never be ready .
This type of constellation won't be able to do it.
They are planning on picking off the users who cable has to run the furthest to off of the ISPs not the close users. If we started spreading out evenly I could see this, but while we've got the population density we do, I don't see this happening.
Each house will interfere with it's neighbor, the more they spread the easier it is.
>The constellation today is not ready for high density usage , it is not that it will never be ready .
I am no sith, I shouldn't speak in absolutes. But, I'd bet that this technology won't disrupt ISPs within 50 miles of a city. I hope it would, but I don't see that happening.
That's not how it works. The FCC doesn't just free up massive spectrum from other places. We're talking about 500MHz chunks that just don't exist. The FCC favors cell technologies, so if anything, they would take it away from them.
The bandwidth calculations work out about the same, as the users are pretty much stationary - users will be in an area handled by ~one satellite at a time (with handover between satellites).
What you said at the end is not true. It does not have a relatively uniform signal at all areas of the earth (on purpose, since they know where the customers are), and it's not a benefit to be standing capacity where nobody lives.
Fixed line ISPs share much of the same infrastructure with 5g/4g providers. The only difference between them is the last mile, so it's not like 5g providers magically dont need any backhaul infrastructure and could provide dramatically lower prices.
I read some claims that the power bus was unstable and thus it shut down the satellite radio multiple times before it could transmit much meaningful data. Which would imply that Starlink wouldn't have changed much in this regard.
But you’re missing the reality of the situation. Hypothetically cable is better and cheaper but in reality it isn’t because of corruption and the fact that cable has to occupy a physical space which forced the involvement of governments which makes everything terrible. Starlink will finally provide good competition to these bastards in rural areas... im in Des Moines metro area where cable sucks for no reason. I can’t wait.
Cell companies are also the last people you want to get your "main internet" from. Bandwidth caps, throttling, accounts shut down because actually what they meant is that "unlimited" means "200 GB/month".
This is 100% meant to supplement existing infrastructure not to replace it. You will almost always get cheaper and faster internet (for both you and the company providing internet) over a cable to your house. If you can't get that, then maybe a cell tower is better, if that doesn't work, then a land based beaming internet may be better, after that I'd look to space based internet.
It can probably supplant land based beaming internet, but I don't see this replacing ISPs/4g/5g anytime soon.
The target audience for much of this infrastructure is the places you can't put a cell tower, but want to get signal. Ocean based travel being a big one.
EDIT: I will contend. 5g could beat out ISPs at cost (which I thought I'd made more clear above). It's about the cost of infrastructure given the population density. I don't have as much knowledge in that area as I do satellite costs. But satellites won't beat out 5G at cost, not even with the reduced cost to space that SpaceX provides. It could with another couple orders of magnitude cost reduction in space. But there's a reason SpaceX is targeting only 5 million Americans and not 300 million.